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Tag: Financing

It’s not easy to predict the future when it comes to workplace systems but identifying the trends can help signpost what businesses and their employees need in order to meet demands. In a conference session dedicated to workplace systems, Barbara d’Introno, Product Marketing Manager for Workplace Systems at Fujitsu, discussed several trends in the workplace and how Fujitsu is meeting these demands with its new products.

The critical need for most businesses, it seems, is to boost workplace productivity. Within this, however, a human-centric approach is key. Employees are under pressure to be more productive and achieve more in their day – something the technology they use can either help or hinder. The need for productivity has driven some specific innovations from Fujitsu, including a Lifebook with an integrated modular bay projector. Designed with the traveling sales executive in mind, the integrated projector allows users to deliver slick presentations without relying on unfamiliar equipment at the locations they visit. Even with the focus on salespeople, it’s easy to see wider demand for this type of integrated workplace system for creatives, trainers and many other types of business people.

Another productivity-focused innovation has been aimed at the IT administrator. Typically, he or she would face a huge time challenge deleting data before repurposing or selling PCs at the end of the three to four year lifecycle – in fact many companies have faced significant costs through outsourcing this activity. The Fujitsu solution is to enable deletion of all the data direct from the BIOS – this can be done just as easily for one PC as for 1,000, saving significant resources and improving productivity for the IT administrator.

To enable direct time-saving, Fujitsu has launched the FastOn PC at the Fujitsu Forum today. It is able to boot in less than 13 seconds, compared to a typical device boot time of around 25 seconds. This may seem a small reduction but multiplied across hundreds or thousands of employees using it every day, the time saved becomes really significant.

Green IT remains an important trend, as d’Introno explained, in fact more important than it was a year ago. A raft of Fujitsu products, led by the proGREEN range have been introduced by Fujitsu. Particularly interesting products in this area include the intelligent AC adapter, which stops taking power from the socket as soon as the device is charged and the zero client, a type of thin client that can offer a 70 percent reduction in power consumption compared to a standard fat client.

The drive in business to improve productivity in turn influences a technology trend – the need to refresh the company’s workplace technology every three or four years. With this comes a financial challenge – traditionally a complete set of new workplace systems would require a large outlay of CAPEX. Neil Whitelock, Head of Financial Services explained, however, some of the solutions Fujitsu has in place to help enterprises take a more flexible approach to the refresh cycle, including pay-as-you-go models, to meet the challenges of no CAPEX or limited OPEX.

It seems clear that the challenges business face still center around a gloomy economic outlook. Empowering employees to improve their productivity by getting more from their technology is a strategy that successful enterprises are following and Fujitsu’s technology is helping them to achieve it.

To find out more about the technology mentioned, including the FastOn PC and the intelligent AC adapter, visit the demo centre at the Fujitsu Forum.